The Peace Corps in Panamá

What, you might wonder, do the following contests have to do with the Peace Corps?

• Opening a coconut (pipa) with a machete and drinking the contents as fast as possible.

• Seeing how accurately you can hit a target with a handmade blowgun used by indigenous tribes to hunt monkeys for food.

While a welcome change of pace from seminars and workshops, they are both part of the team-building exercises I and 135 other volunteers living and working in Panamá were enjoying last month.

Another team activity was to see how many volunteers could stand on a meter square — a variant of the game we played in my teens of packing ourselves into a telephone booth. Of course, in the U.S., telephone booths now exist only as collectible antiques.

Right now we volunteers are spread over the nine Panamanian provinces and five of the seven indigenous regions. We rarely see each other. However, once a year Peace Corps organizes a four-day All Volunteer Conference to introduce us to one another and to provide additional training for our roles. This March we met in Chitre, the regional capital of Herrera Province, near the geographic center of the country. Almost all the volunteers and half the staff of 32 were on hand.

The Peace Corps in Panamá (Cuerpo de Paz en Panamá) has been here since 1963, two years after the new program was announced as an Executive Order by President John F. Kennedy, except for the Omar Torrijos and Noreiga years of dictatorship (1979-1991), when we were not welcome. An interesting and little-known sidenote is that Kennedy adapted the idea of a Peace Corps from a suggestion made in a speech by candidate (and future LBJ vice president) Hubert Humphrey during the contest for the 1960 Democratic nomination.

As Peace Corps places its volunteers in third-world countries, political instability is not unknown. And at a certain point, developing countries have decided their own citizens can do better the jobs being done by Americans (Argentina and Brazil to name a couple in the Western Hemisphere). Yet, there are more countries asking for volunteers than Peace Corps can fill. Last month President Bush announced a new Peace Corps initiative will go into Liberia in Africa.

Peace Corps was invited back into Panamá in 1991, and we have had volunteers here since. In fact, this July, the 45th anniversary of the first group of volunteers, those who served here are all being invited back for a reunion. I hope to attend and share insights with those who labored here in a pre-Internet, pre-cellphone era.

At the Chitre gathering, my group of 34 was the most recently arrived, having come to Panamá in early August 2007. Others had been here a year or two. Some were nearing the end of their 27-month posting, while others had volunteered for an optional third year. Most are young, as you can see from the photographs, and Peace Corps’ current efforts to attract “Baby Boomers” is not demonstrated by having only four over-50s now in Panamá. The stated goal of Peace Corps is to attract 15 percent of its volunteers from this age group. There are six married couples (Peace Corps will not accept unwed couples).

We all stayed at Los Guayacanes Hotel just outside Chitre. For Peace Corps, it was definitely upscale, but finding a place to accommodate 150 people for three nights is no easy task, even sticking three or four to a room. (If you don’t do well with shared bathrooms, you’re out of luck.)

From my home in Gualaca, Chitre meant three separate buses and about seven hours of travel. A few volunteers had to travel farther, coming from the Darien, and distant locations in the indigenous regions (las comarcas).

At the close of the conference, I left my colleagues and boarded a bus heading home, feeling bolstered, knowing that I was not the only one making sacrifices in my life (no movies, restaurants, concerts, exhibits, warm water, washing machine, and speaking imperfect Spanish all-day, every day) in order to make a difference in the lives of others. And along the way, I picked up insights about doing my job more effectively. Finally, with the hotel buffet, I didn’t have to cook a meal for four days!